Recent research from the University of Arizona, USA, suggests that workers who work in open-plan offices are more active and less stressed compared to the workers who have their desks in cubicles or separate offices.

The researchers of the study claim that they were the first who measured activity and stress in office workers instead of asking them with the help of questionnaires. Having analyzed the activity, the scientists concluded that workers in open-plan offices were 32% more physically active than those in private offices and 20% more active than those in cubicles.

Esther Sternberg, a study author and professor at University of Arizona College of Medicine, says: “We all know we should be increasing our activity but no matter how we try to encourage people to engage in healthy behavior, it doesn’t work for long. So changing office design to encourage a healthy behavior is a passive way of getting people to be more active.”

According to a new study from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, employees who mix their professional and personal lives feel more emotionally exhausted and have the lower sense of well-being than people who maintain a clear separation between work and personal lives.

For the study, a team of researchers analyzed the data of 1,916 employees from German-speaking countries where about 50% worked least 40 hours per week.

Study co-author Ariane Wepfer of the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute of the University of Zurich, says: “Employees who integrated work into their non-work life reported being more exhausted because they recovered less. This lack of recovery activities furthermore explains why people who integrate their work into the rest of their lives have a lower sense of well-being.”

A new study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that productivity is highest when people had a six-hour workday. They examined working hours in several countries for 22 years.

Moreover, a consultancy company for the public sector in Sweden executed research with 68 nurses working 6 hours per day. These nurses have been working 6 hours a day since February 2015. After 18 months of working with six-hour workday, 77% of nurses reported good health compared to 49% nurses from the control group. Also, members of the trial group took nearly three times fewer sick days.

David Spencer, professor of economics and political economy at the University of Leeds, UK, believes that the trial in Sweden is small in scale and focuses on a particular sector, but this method could be used in other sectors with a range of adjustings.

A new study, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review, suggests that having social links with the co-workers can significantly influence your health.

Having analyzed 58 studies with more than 19,000 employed people from 15 countries, the scientists found that how strongly people identified their colleagues or organization was associated with better health and a decreased risk of burnout.

Niklas Steffens, a lead researcher from the University of Queensland, Australia, says: “These results show that both performance and health are enhanced to the extent that workplaces provide people with a sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’. Social identification contributes to both psychological and physiological health, but the health benefits are stronger for psychological health.”